Ted Nugent Calls Deer Hunting the “Ultimate Sport”

What else would Ted Nugent call the “ultimate sport?”

With Superbowl Sunday 2014 just one week away, America is thoroughly immersed in the end of football season. However, while many consider the game to be the “ultimate” sport – especially on college campuses, where football games are routinely the biggest events of the year – Detroit rocker Ted Nugent believes that another sport should hold that title: hunting.

Nugent’s opinion on the subject is perhaps not the most surprising statement in the world. In addition to his membership in numerous rock and roll bands – including the Amboy Dukes, a 1960s and ‘70s band for which he served as lead guitarist – Ted Nugent is also a noted hunting enthusiast.

He currently hosts the popular hunting reality show, “Spirit of the Wild,” on the Outdoor Channel – named after one of his songs – and he’s appeared in various other hunting shows and worked with businesses over the years.

Given Nugent’s outspoken activism for both hunting and firearm rights, he was unsurprisingly present at the 2014 SHOT Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. There, in an interview with a writer from Breitbart.com, Nugent revealed his view of hunting as the ultimate sport.

In the rock star-turned-hunter’s estimation, hunting is a more challenging and high stakes sport than any of the high-profile games that end up being broadcast on television, including football and television. In football or baseball, Nugent views an athlete’s biggest failure as striking out or missing a touchdown pass. In hunting, he says the stakes are entirely different and significantly more daunting: “If you miss in deer hunting, you buy a chicken for dinner,” Nugent said.

While Ted Nugent is certainly the type of outspoken individual who is prone to giving himself over to exaggeration, he has a point in this regard. Hunting as a sport is something that, if you are good at it, can keep you alive. It can put food on the table, keep you fit, and fill up your days with fulfilling and challenging experiences.

While athletes who partake in sports for a (massive) paycheck can also safely say that their sports keep them alive, it hardly equates to the same thing. Football players and baseball players thrive thanks to a society that promotes ubiquitous media attention, corporate endorsements, and other luxuries. While some professional hunters have all of these things as well, their core sport is still something that doubles as a survival skill, something that would keep them alive if the world was suddenly stricken by a crisis where sports and other entertainments and diversions vanished from the public consciousness.

In some ways, hunting is the ultimate sport because it has a place in virtually any society, be it a technologically advanced one where the media reigns supreme or a prehistoric one where families and tribes watch after one another. As far as sporting activities are concerned, hunting came before football and baseball and will be here after they are gone.

Still, despite all of this, some people out there aren’t even ready to view hunting as a sport because it doesn’t involve running at high speeds or tossing balls around. But despite those “shortcomings,” hunting can be as mentally and physically exhausting as any sport, forcing hunters to give their best in stealth, tracking, marksmanship, discipline, perseverance, and more.

With all of this in mind, we’re ready to agree with Ted Nugent on this one: hunting IS the ultimate sport.